I am Forbes' Opinion Editor. I am a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and the author of How Medicaid Fails the Poor (Encounter, 2013). In 2012, I served as a health care policy advisor to Mitt Romney. To contact me, click here. To receive a weekly e-mail digest of articles from The Apothecary, sign up here, or you can subscribe to The Apothecary’s RSS feed or my Twitter feed. In addition to my Forbes blog, I write on health care, fiscal matters, finance, and other policy issues for National Review. My work has also appeared in National Affairs, USA Today, The Atlantic, and other publications. I've appeared on television, including on MSNBC, CNBC, HBO, Fox News, and Fox Business. For an archive of my writing prior to February 2011, please visit avikroy.net. Professionally, I'm the founder of Roy Healthcare Research, an investment and policy research firm. In this role, I serve as a paid advisor to health care investors and industry stakeholders. Previously, I worked as an analyst and portfolio manager at J.P. Morgan, Bain Capital, and other firms.

I’ll get to President Obama’s unremarkable State of the Union address in a moment. But first I want to discuss the first major televised address of the man who very well may be the next President of the United States: Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. Sen. Rubio forthrightly addressed in both English and Spanish the principal domestic challenge of our time—the health care-driven budget deficit—while President Obama dishonestly insisted that Medicare reform was being held hostage by “special interest tax breaks.”

“Obamacare,” said Rubio, “was supposed to help middle class Americans afford health insurance. But now, some people are losing the health insurance they were happy with. And because Obamacare created expensive requirements for companies with more than 50 employees, now many of these businesses aren’t hiring. Not only that: they’re being forced to lay people off and switch from full-time employees to part-time workers.”

In that one paragraph, Sen. Rubio captured the fundamental flaw in the so-called Affordable Care Act: it makes health insurance more expensive, in turn making hiring more expensive, and our health-care entitlements more expensive. But what Rubio did better than any recent GOP respondent to the President’s State of the Union address is to express, in relatable language that appealed to people who don’t already vote Republican.

“The biggest obstacles to balancing the budget,” he continued, “are programs where spending is already locked in. One of these programs, Medicare, is especially important to me. It provided my father the care he needed to battle cancer and ultimately die with dignity. And it pays for the care my mother receives now. I would never support any changes to Medicare that would hurt seniors like my mother. But anyone who is in favor of leaving Medicare exactly the way it is right now, is in favor of bankrupting it.”

“Republicans have offered a detailed and credible plan that helps save Medicare without hurting today’s retirees. Instead of playing politics with Medicare, when is the President going to offer his plan to save it? Tonight would have been a good time for him to do it.”

Obamacare expanded health-care entitlements

In fairness to the President, he did sign into law $716 billion in Medicare cuts over the next ten years—but he’s using those cuts to partially fund $1.9 trillion in additional health spending for others over the same period. And liberal wags on Twitter argued last night that Rubio’s successful performance was more an indictment of the previous SOTU respondents than a statement of Rubio’s eloquence.

I don’t agree. Paul Ryan and Mitch Daniels, in particular, effectively critiqued the President’s policies in their SOTU responses. But Rubio went a step further, largely because he could speak so persuasively of his own journey as the son of immigrants in a middle-class Miami neighborhood.

President Obama, for his part, agreed that “the biggest driver of our long-term debt is the rising cost of health care for an aging population. And those of us who care deeply about programs like Medicare must embrace the need for modest reforms—otherwise, our retirement programs will crowd out the investments we need for our children, and jeopardize the promise of a secure retirement for future generations. But we can’t ask senior citizens and working families to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction while asking nothing more from the wealthiest and more powerful.”

But here’s the rub: For President Obama, “asking something from the wealthiest” translates into raising taxes on economically productive businesses, instead of reducing federal spending on the wealthy. If we gradually raised the Medicare eligibility age, for example, the net effect would be to prevent taxpayers from subsidizing the health care of wealthy retirees, because the means-tested exchanges would gradually replace the universal Medicare program.

But Obama is enamored of the opposite approach: raising taxes and hurting economic growth, so as to ensure that the federal government can continue to support health spending on people who don’t need the government’s help. Obama once again brought up the canard about Warren Buffett’s secretary having a lower tax rate than Warren Buffett, but he was silent on the question of why a secretary pays taxes to fund Buffett’s health coverage.

If you think I’m putting words into the President’s mouth, yesterday, his press secretary, Jay Carney, said that Obama “has made clear that we don’t believe that that’s the right policy to take.” Obama supported raising the retirement age in concert with tax hikes, but not as a replacement for cuts to discretionary federal spending.

For the next two years, President Obama’s main goal is to help Democrats retake the House of Representatives, so that the remainder of his term can be devoted to a broad range of progressive policy objectives. Republicans will only be able to withstand Democrats’ barrage with sound policy and an effective spokesman. In Marco Rubio, they clearly have the spokesman.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

So, Sen. Rubio thinks the is too much government and too many taxes. Well that is hardly a new and different direction for a major Republican candidate. He will no doubt be in favor of “The Nanny State” telling women they can or cannot do with their bodies and oppose women serving combat. He will appeal to Christian Fundamentalists and oppose equal rights for Gays and Lesbians.

In other words Sen. Rubio will continue to market the same Ding-Dongs and Twinkies that consumers were not buying last year or four years before that. The Republican Brand is like the Hostess Brand, they both keep selling the same old products that were very popular 30 years ago no matter how few people buy them now

Rubio did sell me…that I need to restock on bottled water. Your “analysis” of his pre-scripted rant centered on the lack of compassion for a women’s medical needs was clearly not a retort to the state of the union because most of this response was replying to thing not even mentioned in the president’s address. This qualifies it not as a response, but as a speech unrelated that hopefully would ignite closed minded, left of the bell curve dolts like you self. This is assuming that you believe what you write and that you aren’t paid to have this particular ‘opinion’

The very best way to seal the border is to change the law from a misdemeanor to a felony.First time caught you serve 10yrs.,then deported.No more problem,get a backbone,solve the problem.Insist on this as part of the immigration law.-sparky

Mr. Roy, are you sure you were listening to Rubio? That “speech” was the worst pile of badly and sweatily delivered pile of 5th grade garbage in a long time. (A bit like a younger version of Boehner,) If he is the new hope of the GOP, they are going to go down the drain even faster.

Hard work and the proper role of government took center stage in President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union Address. For some historic perspective we might look back to WWII when another generation was asked to work hard and sacrifice on behalf of the war effort by a powerful national government that raised taxes, dictated prices, rationed goods, and dispensed advice on everything from child rearing to good nutrition.

My new multimedia iBook “Workers Win the War: Toil and Sacrifice on the US Homefront” [$2.99 at iTunes http://bit.ly/VQopZY ] will take you back in time to experience first-hand how the government mobilized public support for the war through higher taxes, hard work and sacrifice. Contrast that era with our “homefront” experience today, when only our troops and their families have been asked to make sacrifices for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This book is rich with WWII media – 80 posters, 18 films, cartoons, radio broadcast, recording and sheet music and a dozen rarely-seen pamphlets – from Bugs Bunny selling bonds in blackface, to Burns and Allen joking on the radio about rationing, to posters claiming taking a sick day was treasonous.